by Sam Sisavath
Finally, Quinn said, “Porter?” She hadn’t done it on purpose, but her voice was just barely above a whisper.
“He’s not here, so he should be in the other stairwell by now with the others.” She paused to listen, except there was nothing to hear but their labored breathing.
What if he didn’t make it? Quinn thought. What if none of them made it?
“Come on, we have to stick to the plan,” Xiao said, and hurried past her and up the stairs.
Quinn looked back at the door before turning and following Xiao.
Mack.
Abbie.
Jack.
Kyle.
And there was Gaines, who was watching the back door with Kyle when the lobby was breached.
Gaines.
She didn’t even know what he looked like. Not that she really knew the others except by their names and what little interaction she’d had with them before all hell broke loose. And yet they were the reason she was still alive, trying desperately not to peel her still-itchy skin off with her fingernails as she made her way up the stairwell behind Xiao. They hadn’t come here to rescue her—it was always about Porter; they were, after all, the Sons of Porter—but they’d rescued her just the same.
Mack. Abbie. Jack. Kyle. Gaines.
And there were the two she’d never gotten to meet, who had died assaulting the building. She didn’t even know their names, but she owed them. Even now, she struggled to remember the faces of the ones whose names she did know.
They hadn’t said a word since Xiao told her the plan, and they started moving up the stairs toward the rooftop. Even from down here, Quinn could hear the half dozen (or more) helicopters circling around up there. A fair number of those would be law enforcement, with the rest belonging to the media.
Aaron’s plan. I’m putting my life in the hands of a teenager who probably has never kissed a girl.
I must be crazy.
But she didn’t speak her mind, because it wasn’t going to do any good. Xiao was right: There was only one way left for them to go, and that was up. The lobby was gone. It would be crawling with Rhim operatives right now, probably searching for their bodies even as the smoke thinned out. Some would head down to the service center to retake it while others would scour the lobby. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before they realized she and Xiao and whoever else had made it to the other stairwell (If any of them made it at all) weren’t still down there.
Xiao seemed to have come to the same conclusion and was concentrating on moving up to the rooftop. They passed the second floor without incident, even though Quinn thought she might have heard movement behind the stairwell door—what sounded like a frantic rush to get away as they neared.
It was the same on the third and the fourth floors, and it wasn’t until they were rounding the fifth that Quinn finally heard what she had been (dreading) waiting for: The slow, almost creepy creeeeeeeeak from below them.
Here they come…
Xiao heard it too and picked up her pace while simultaneously keeping her footsteps amazingly quiet. Quinn didn’t know how she did that, especially when every single one of her own steps sounded like firecrackers. But as loud as she was being, it was nothing compared to the echoing noise from far below belonging to men in heavy body armor and thick combat boots as they cautiously entered the narrow confines of the stairwell in pursuit.
She didn’t know what the presence of commandos below them meant for Porter and the others. She couldn’t even begin to speculate. Had they even made it into the other stairwell? There was no way to know. In the chaos of the breach, they had been separated, with everyone not sure where to go. It didn’t occur to Quinn until much later that she wasn’t the only one who had been stumbling around blind in the belching smoke, but Xiao had too, which was why it had taken them so long to find the stairs again.
They were stepping onto the sixth-floor landing when muted gunfire echoed from behind the wall, coming from across the elevator shaft.
Porter!
Xiao stopped momentarily to listen before flashing her a grin. Quinn smiled back because shooting from the other stairwell meant only one thing: Either Porter or Mack, or at least someone else, were still alive other than them.
Thank God. Thank God…
Quinn risked stepping close to the railing in order to peek down, exposing herself just enough to glimpse the jagged line of black-clad figures coming up behind them. They were somewhere on the second floor and moving slowly, cautiously. There had to be a dozen of them, and they didn’t look to be in any hurry, even after the renewed bursts of gunfire from the other stairwell. If there were that many down there following them, how many more were chasing Porter (If he’s still alive) and the others?
Behind her, Xiao had continued up the stairs, and it may have just been Quinn’s imagination, but she thought the other woman had a little more pep to her step. Quinn turned to follow, even as she heard more scurrying from behind the stairwell door to her. She had to remind herself that she was the bad guy here, at least to the civilians that had been caught in the crossfire.
The shooting from the other stairwell continued without any real pattern—growing in intensity, then fading, then another barrage, then more long silences. It was still going on when she and Xiao finally rounded the last floor and located the roof access.
The door was metallic and there were bricks of C4 attached to it, connected to a sophisticated detonation rig similar to the one she’d seen on the downstairs lobby doors. Xiao stood in front of the setup, and before Quinn could ask if she knew what she was doing, the other woman pulled a couple of wires and ripped the device off the door.
Quinn flinched when the bricks of explosives slapped against the hard floor. A second later she was still standing, even if her heart had leapt into her throat.
Xiao put her hand on the lever and glanced back at her. “Ready?”
Quinn wasted two seconds looking over the railing and down at the black-clad figures moving steadily up the floors toward them. They were on the fifth and ascending, still moving with painful deliberation.
She turned back to Xiao. “No, but as someone once said to me, do it anyway.”
Xiao flashed her a grin that Quinn couldn’t decide was comforting or scary.
A little of both—or a lot of the latter.
Xiao held up her other hand with all five fingers extended. Then she pulled one down:
One…
Quinn sighed and did the best she could to control her suddenly accelerating heartbeat.
Two…
Sweat covered her brow. She didn’t know why, because it was cool inside the stairwell. She wiped at her forehead with her shirtsleeve.
Three…
Quinn tightened her fingers around the Sig Sauer. The gun felt heavier than usual and not nearly as comforting as it had been earlier.
Four…
Aaron, Quinn thought. I’m putting my life in the hands of a teenage kid. I must be crazy, Ben.
Five!
Xiao pushed down on the lever and, lifting her submachine gun, burst through the still-opening door.
Quinn was right on her heels and moving as fast as she could. She was lifting the Sig Sauer to her chest, forefinger brushing against the trigger, and had gotten a foot outside onto the roof when the blinding sunlight hit her in eyes that were already strained from drowning in tear gas.
She blinked once, twice—and didn’t get the chance to do it a third time before something struck her in the back of the head. It was heavy and thick and it landed with purpose, delivered by someone who knew what they were doing.
Quinn stumbled out of the access door even as she tried desperately to hold onto her weapon. Her legs became rubber as she glimpsed uniformed figures appearing at the edges of her stinging eyes to surround her.
She had lost sight of Xiao as soon as the other woman lunged through the opening rooftop door and was swallowed up by the sea of white.
Even as her eyes adjusted to the
brightness, Quinn had no trouble seeing the glint of rifle barrels aimed at her from such close proximity that she thought she might be able to reach out and grab at one of them—
A second blow, this one landing on the back of her neck, forcing her down on one knee. Somewhere between being struck (again!) and falling to the graveled floor, she ended up staring straight up at the sky.
Helicopters.
A lot of them. At least a dozen—two dozen?
They swarmed above her like fireflies. All-black choppers, white ones with numbers, and some with letters on the sides. It didn’t seem possible that so many aircraft would—or should—be crowding around in such a small airspace.
Someone shouted—a man, his voice booming and commanding: “Get down! Get down on your fucking knees!”
She wanted to tell him, I am down, asshole! but before she could, something collided with the side of her head and any defiance she might have been able to summon vanished in the blink of an eye.
Then she was falling as if from a great height, before the feel of being stabbed by hundreds of tiny knives in the face. She fought through the agony and tried to stay awake, to push against the pain, but it was a losing battle.
Shouts and the surprisingly pleasant whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades filled her ears, sending gusts of wind all around her, embracing her.
Chapter 32
I’m in the tank. I’m in one of those re-sequencing tanks that I pulled Porter out of.
Except the images and sounds that were coming to her, first in little snippets, then in larger doses, didn’t match with that theory.
Or did it?
Concentrate!
She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then opened them again.
There…
Not inside the tank. Not even close.
She was surrounded by men in drab olive-green uniforms, wearing assault vests and ballistic helmets, but not the hulking black-clad commandos that were chasing her and Xiao up the stairwell, or the ghostly specters she’d crossed in the lobby.
Did it make any difference? She didn’t know. Not yet.
She remembered being dragged along the rooftop and gravel crunching against her legs. Then being hoisted up and into something. A vehicle. Not just any vehicle, but a helicopter. The whup-whup-whup of rotor blades stuck out in her mind.
There had been more shouting—someone giving orders, someone questioning them. But the one giving orders—the loud booming voice that had told her to “Get down! Get down on your fucking knees!” earlier—had won out.
Then she remembered rising, rising into the air, the feeling of weightlessness filling her body until she just wanted to lie back and stop fighting. But had she really been fighting at all? She couldn’t recall that part very well. She could have just been a rag doll being moved around, for all she knew.
That was the same time reality started slipping from her grasp despite all her desperate attempts to hold on, just hold on a little longer.
Her final thoughts, before blackness overcame her, was of Ben, and the last thing he had said to her:
“About your past… I told myself I did it to protect you, but maybe…I don’t know. Maybe I did it to protect myself a little bit, too.”
She was inside a moving vehicle. Not a helicopter this time, because she could feel the ground under her and it was bumpy.
A road. Helicopters didn’t need roads.
A truck.
She was in the back of a moving truck with benches on both sides and the same men in drab olive uniforms she’d seen before (Wait, did she lose consciousness again?) surrounding her. Armed. Heavily armed. Ballistic helmets and black sunglasses. Slivers of sunlight poured in from heavily tinted and thick bulletproof glass windows above their heads.
Her head was clearing, the memories coming back, and she was able to piece it all together.
These were the same commandos that had been waiting for her on the rooftop, then dragged her into a waiting helicopter. She was sure of it now.
Wasn’t she?
She had trouble keeping her eyes open, but the sounds of their voices—chatting, laughing, giddy—helped to keep her from being pulled back into the void. Her ankles were shackled along with her wrists, restraints fastened to the hard metal bench she was barely sitting upright on.
Xiao. Where was Xiao?
Sitting next to her. Similarly bound.
She looked okay.
Okay? None of this is okay.
We’re going to die. They’re going to take us in and process us, and then the Rhim will come and kill us to keep us quiet.
“History is written by the victors,” someone once said.
They would be lucky to last more than a single night at wherever they were being taken, because they had lost this one.
She, Xiao, and Porter.
(Porter. Are you still alive out there?)
She didn’t recognize the SWAT uniforms of the men around her, and there were no decals along the walls to clue her in on her captors’ identities. But they weren’t HRT. She knew that much.
Did that make any difference?
Maybe…
What was Xiao doing? She had woken up and was staring forward at one of the men sitting on the bench to their right, near the back of the vehicle. He was in his fifties, older than everyone in the vehicle by far, but fit. He would have to be, Quinn thought, to carry all that gear around, including the M4 military rifle he had slung in front of him.
The man was looking right back at Xiao.
What’s happening? Why are they staring at each other?
Quinn struggled to sit up on the bench—her head was full of boulders, and it was so much easier to leave it lolled helplessly to one side.
Xiao looked over at her, and before Quinn could say anything, the other woman mouthed, “Get ready.”
Get ready? Get ready for what?
Or had Xiao actually mouthed those words at all, and she hadn’t just imagined it? She wasn’t feeling herself. Far from it. There was no telling what she was capable of coming up with in her weakened state.
Because why would Xiao tell her to “get ready?” What was there to “get ready” for?
But Xiao had already looked away before Quinn could confirm, and Quinn followed her gaze back to the older SWAT commando. The man was calmly pulling on his gas mask.
Why is he doing that? Quinn thought, when she smelled it—a sharp, acidic aroma that flicked at her eyes and made her cheeks tingle the way the tear gas had earlier, except whatever was filling up the truck was more subtle and invisible.
Her eyes began watering and her head became lightheaded, and she thought, Here we go again.
And she wasn’t the only one feeling it. The men around her were starting to get teary-eyed and were scratching at their faces, some at their necks. Then one by one they collapsed forward, a few landing in a pile in the open space between the benches, while others simply toppled sideways and propped against one another.
What’s happening? What’s…
A body slumped against her shoulder. Xiao, unconscious and leaning against her.
Quinn tried to process what she was seeing, but she might as well be trying to swim her way up a sea of mud. Maybe she was still reeling from being struck in the head multiple times, or the effects of the tear gas in the office building was still causing short circuits in her mental abilities. But none of that explained why all the SWAT commandos and Xiao had lost consciousness while she was—
No, she wasn’t fine. Whatever the gas had been, it was just taking its time getting its nails into her. But she could feel it now, burrowing its way in little by little, until every thought and movement—something as simple as wiggling her fingers—came to her in frustrating slow motion.
“Don’t fight it,” a muffled voice said.
She struggled to glance up at a gas-masked face staring down at her. The same man who had been sitting at the end of the bench was reaching over and pulling Xiao off Quinn’s shoulder and
putting her into a more comfortable position. Then he did the same for her.
The cold metal of the truck’s interior was harsh against the back of her head, but she focused on the brown eyes peering at her through the clear lens of the gas mask.
“You’re Rhim,” she managed to get out. It might have just been a mere whisper.
The man shook his head. “No.”
“You’re Rhim,” she repeated.
“No,” the man said again.
Liar, she thought, before she closed her eyes and drifted—mercifully—back into a deep, deep sleep.
“Wake up, Quinn.”
The voice was familiar. So familiar, and yet beyond her grasp.
“It’s time to wake up.”
It was soft. Feminine. A woman. At once soothing and caring, and stern and demanding. She knew the voice, so why couldn’t she remember who it belonged to?
“Wake up!”
She opened her eyes to Aaron sitting in a black metal chair, spinning a Rubik’s Cube around in his hands, the clack-clack-clack of the toy echoing in her ears. The voice disappeared as soon as she woke up, and it didn’t matter how hard Quinn tried to recall it, to pull it back, because it was gone.
Who are you? Why can’t I remember you?
Aaron had glanced over. There were scratches on his face and two small bandages over his temple, evidence that he hadn’t escaped the bombing at the warehouse entirely unscathed after all. But he still had all his limbs and didn’t seem to be in pain.
“You’re finally back,” the teenager said.
“Aaron?”
“Expecting someone else?”
Porter. Or Xiao…
“No,” she said.
The kid tossed the half-finished Rubik’s Cube into the corner where it rolled around. “Spent two days on that thing and still can’t figure it out.”
“I thought you were a genius.”
“Whatever gave you that silly idea?”
She struggled to sit up on the bed. No, not really a bed. A cot. A very small, narrow, and squeaky cot. When she scooted backward, she felt a thick, cold concrete wall behind her. The entire room was chilly.